BBC R&DTV – Creative Commons Tech TV

In an interesting, and to be applauded, move from the BBC, they are now releasing a technology based television programme under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licence. R&DTV’s first episode is now available for free download in a number of file formats. There is a full 30 minute version available, a shorter 5 minute highlight version, as well as a complete Asset Bundle, which includes rushes that may not have made it into the final programme versions.

The programme is PAL 720×576. The aspect appears to be 14:9 anamorphic. The little person inside me who wants the greatest and the best all the time, wonders why the filming wasn’t done in HD, even HDV would do.

I thought the “formats” described on the R&DTV website were a bit vague. What does QuickTime format and Matroska format really mean? Sure, I know about QuickTime and Matroska containers, but this doesn’t say anything about the video and audio essence contained therein. The best way to find out about this is to download each video and let FFmpeg take a look.

That’s H.264 video with PCM audio. Strange they didn’t use AAC audio in a QuickTime file. Looking at that 10Mbps bitrate though, I’m guessing perhaps the BBC is expecting people to use this version for editing. But then why use H.264, rather than something that’s I-Frame only like IMX50? There’s also an Uncompressed version and another QuickTime version, which we’ll come to later.

H.264 video again and AAC audio again. When opening this file with Totem to view, the Comments section says “HandBrake 0.9.3 2008121800″. Nice to know the BBC is using Open Source software for at least some of their video transcoding.

Theora for the video and vorbis for the audio, again no surprises there. 5.1 audio is a nice touch though. However, again, the bitrate is very low. Why would the BBC do this? The MP4 version, with H.264 video at a higher bitrate, is going to look far superior.

There we go, raw video in the 4:2:2 colour space at 165Mbps, with PCM audio again. I wonder whether the content was filmed at anywhere near this resolution. Given that the programme is only SD, I’m guessing that the highest quality recording would have been done direct to Digital Betacam, which is only the equivalent of 90Mbps, unless of course the whole thing was done tapeless, which I must admit to doubting.

One last puzzlement is why a Dirac version wasn’t supplied, given that this is the BBC’s own R&D developed codec.